I was starting to realize that “hospital world” and “real-adult” world were two separate entities. Especially when coming back to the world included having the immune system of a baby — currently 4 months old, to be exact.

We must all learn to love ourselves through difficult things. For me, after everything my body and I have been through together, I can honestly say that I do love it. It’s a badass. And maybe, I am too.

We have the ability to decide how we approach every storm we find ourselves in throughout our lives. That doesn’t make them any less potent and our situation any less terrible, but it does determine the outcome.

I’d been asking myself that for the last 5 years. I’d asked myself countless times, laying on the bathroom floor naked, what would I do if you were given the choice?If you could get rid of this, would you?

We become so wrapped up in our apparent non-effect on other people that we forget that we very much do. Not just with germs and vaccines, but with actions and words too. Learning how to touch again has been all about trusting that other people maintain their part of the bargain; as is most of life.

After five years, a truly impossible thing had taken place on a remarkable timeline. I was sitting in the middle of an unprecedented moment; something I’d never allowed myself to accept as a possibility.

This is what life was like for me at the brink of nothing. No blood type; no immune system. To be absolutely empty except what’s going on in your head. It’s an odd place; to wake up in the morning and know that you’ve got nothing left — but to feel as though you are so much.

If your teaching a child to read, you should be teaching a child to read to their future — to build the type of community you want to live in on this Earth in this life. Everything else comes second, and that is the only way that God should come first.